DAY 5 Edition - IFA International 2017

NEWS European Smart Home

NEWS European Smart Home Players Join Forces Associations in UK, Germany and France will share knowledge and drive sales Three smart home associations in the UK, Germany and France have teamed up to drive deployments and meet growing consumer demand across Europe. The partnership agreement was announced in the IFA Smart Home pavilion yesterday. The Smart Home M2M market in Western Europe has been predicted to grow at a CAGR of nearly 50% between 2015-2019, according to Orbis Research. In response, the UK’s Smart Homes & Buildings Association (SH&BA), Germany’s SmartHome Initiative Deutschland e.V. (SHID) and the Fédération Française de Domotique (FFD) have formed a European committee to better co-ordinate joint activities. The three bodies have successfully developed smart home ecosystems in their respective countries for over a decade, representing over 600 professional members, including OEMs, retailers, distributors, ISVs, integrators, telcos, and energy suppliers. “Membership in each national organisation will automatically open up new sources of information as we establish mutual membership of each other’s associations,” Günther Ohland, President of Smart Home Initiative Germany said. “In this way, we will provide an injection of new ideas and start a pan- European exchange” Günther Ohland President of Smart Home Initiative Germany Hall 26c Stands 100 /121 ALEXA GIVES VOICE TO IFA NEXT Hall 26a Stand 221 Amazon Alexa is at IFA for the first time, its stand strategically located among the upcoming start-ups located in the IFA Next hall. In the last year, the Alexa personal voice assistant that allows users to control music playback, play movies on TVs, stream podcasts or play audiobooks has been embraced by a host of home electronics companies at IFA – from iRobot to Miele, Philips Hue to Digital Strom, Libratone Zipp to Sanbot. According to Alexa, the voice command software is free to all users with no added licensing fees, meaning that the technology can be simply and cheaply adopted by manufacturers of diverse products from party speakers to personal robots. While the voice assistant was developed alongside the Amazon Echo product range, it has quickly become a universal platform for a technology that is set to revolutionise the way users interact with devices. Like touch, voice has emerged as a natural, sensory means to control a growing range of connected products. The Amazon Alexa voice assistant has therefore positioned itself at the forefront of the voice revolution at its busy IFA Next booth, giving both trade and the public a new perspective into an innovation that will touch businesses and individuals long into the future www.ifa-international.org IFAInternational • Tuesday 5 th September 2017 7